Fleeting beauty ........the Tulip festival at Morges

The Istanbul tulips by the lake

Spring is finally blooming on the shores of Lake Geneva in the town of Morges where tulip mania is at its peak in the form of the most well-known tulip festival in Switzerland.

Growing up in India, I never saw a tulip but every year at school assembly we duly performed a song and dance routine called ‘Holland is the land of tulips’. Exotic, romantically red and very Dutch. My fascination for the tulip grew after reading The Black Tulip by Dumas though I didn't believe for a moment that such a black flower could exist outside of the fictional gardens of Harrlem. 

Now eons later, the clichés unravel. Here by the lakeside in Morges, I see the ‘Cafe Noir’ though it’s more a deep inky purple than black. I see white, brown, 50 shades of pink, lilac and yellow. 300 different varieties to be precise. Serrated, bulbous, lily shaped, tall ones and short ones. With names as exotic as the flowers. From ABBA to Prince; from African Queen to Arabian Mystery; from Lucky Strike to Sensual Touch and from Black Coffee to Brown Sugar with Ice Cream thrown in for good measure ..............

Not quite in carpets and carpets of colorful riot as they would be in Amsterdam. After all, this is Switzerland! The flowers (all 150,000 of them) are planted in neat and aesthetically manicured and patterned beds, all carefully mapped and labeled, everything growing in typical Swiss picture postcard perfection.

Iconic of Holland, the flowers are not really Dutch. They are native to Central Asia and were imported to the Netherlands and the rest of Europe from Turkey (the world tulip is derived from the Turkish word for turban) in the 17^th century. It appears that they became so popular that there was even a tulip bubble with people willing to exchange acres of land, pay more than a year’s wages or barter thousands of pounds of cheese to get hold of one bulb ..

And as for my India connection …………aha, seems like the tulip did grow wild in Kashmir too, long before the Dutch knew of it. And of recent years it is now being cultivated there commercially. Srinagar now boasts the largest tulip garden in Asia with over a million tulips sprawling besides the Dal lake. 

The beauty is so ephemeral. Within a space of a few weeks we were able to witness tulips transition from being in their bulbs, to full bloom to a withered not so pretty sight.

 
 Fleeting beauty, the desire that tantalizes and disappears before you can quite capture and possess it ……..maybe that's what their mystical magic is all about.  

Remembering Chaplin

Walking by the shores of Lac Léman at Vevey, I can’t help but notice a diminutive bronze statue that stands on its banks ………..of a tramp like figure in too small a bowler hat, baggy pants, bow legs, ill-fitting boots, a crooked cane in one hand and clutching a rose in the other; an endearingly quizzical look on his mustached face …………yes its Charlie Chaplin born this month (April 16^th) 124 years ago.

Vevey or rather Corsier-sur-Vevey (this 3,000 people hamlet is technically a municipality in its own right) is where Charlie Chaplin spent the last 25 years of his life in exile from America where he was denied a re-entry permit following the negative reactions to his movie Limelight. He died and is buried in this town ..at least I think he is. His tombstone is here in the local cemetery but there is a story that his body was stolen soon after it was buried there and his widowed wife was hounded for a hefty ransom. Apparently the thieves were caught and the body reburied. Sounds like Chaplin was directing events from the other world as well ……….

While the Swiss Riviera is no stranger to celebrity residents (think Audrey Hepburn, Freddy Mercury), Vevey does take its love for the Little Tramp seriously. The statue on the promenade, entire buildings that have Charlie Chaplin frescoes on their walls and a local artisan chocolatier who handcrafts chocolates made in the likeness of Charlie Chaplin’s shoes.  The Manoir de Ban where he lived is being transformed into ‘The Modern Times’ museum dedicated to his life and works, it will open in 2015.  

Nothing that Vevey does though can quite match the reverence paid to Chaplin in the far away little town of Adipur in Gujarat, India. This little town close to the border with Pakistan, probably unheard of Chaplin in his lifetime, is home to a Chaplin fan club called Charlie’s Circle with over 300 members. Every year for the last 40 years without fail, on April 16^th dozens of boys and men dress up like the little Tramp, bowler hat and all and parade through the town accompanied by camel carts and Indian folk dancers and musicians. The parade is followed by cutting a cake …shaped like Charlie’s shoes of course and a screening of his films. 

My thoughts wander back to the bronze statue by the lake and to the Chaplinesque juxtaposition. Just some 100 meters away in the shallow waters of the lake is a large stainless steel fork all of 8 meters tall. How this piece of modern art came to be in the lake is another story and unrelated to Chaplin but I can just imagine the hint of a smile forming on the Tramps face at this incongruity and I can just picture him taking up this giant fork and turning it into a dance à la the unforgettable fork legs and bread shoes dance in ‘The Gold Rush’. 

As perhaps he himself would say ‘ Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot’.

 

 

Waste not, if you are Swiss

To paraphrase the old Police song:

Every bottle you throw,

Every bag you trash,

I’ll be watching you …………

And yes indeed they are watching, and when you least expect it, nemesis will catch up with you. Nemesis being the trash collectors who also serve as trash police (I have no idea what their official title is).   

Chocolate heaven

It's only a 30 minute walk to heaven. 

Well a steep, uphill 30 minutes but who said the road to heaven is easy?

 
The heaven in question is the village next door. Bougy Villars has a population of 450, a narrow little center street not quite the 'Grand Rue' it is called. It is a hamlet that is barely on the map. It does  however have a stunning view of Lake Geneva. And it has this ...........

The shop at Christmas time

Depending on who you ask or what you read, the Tristan chocolate shop has been variously dubbed the best artisan chocolate in the region, in all of Switzerland and even in the whole world. Whatever superlative you want to use, there is no question that the Truffles, Plaques and endless other variations (chocolate with pepper for e.g. or green tea chocolate), all home made by Tristan and his family, often with help from other villagers are completely exquisite and exotic. And expensive. Though that hardly stops the locals or the expats from driving long distances to wait patiently in queue outside his tiny shop.


chocolates in Tristan's shop

Whether its special chocolate like Tristan or the store brought mass produced varieties, the Swiss do eat a lot of chocolate. As in a kilo a month or 11.9 kilos per person per year. That's a 120 bars of chocolate each year. That makes them the world's largest chocolate consumers (Yes, someone collects such statistics).

Well all the chocolate does not seem to make the Swiss fat but apparently it makes them a lot smarter. In a recent rather unusual article in the New England Journal of Medicine, the author, Franz Messerli, saw a close correlation between a country's per capita chocolate consumption and the number of Nobel prizes per 10 million people. (I cant link to the article as its not open access but if you are interested you can find it in NEJM 367; 16; Oct 18 2012 issue).

The Swiss have the most Nobel prizes relative to population size and also eat the most chocolate. Simple as that. There is even a biochemical explanation it would seem to explain the possible link: the flavinoids in chocolate (in dark chocolate in particular) improve the mental faculties. The author goes on to estimate that for every 400 gram increase in the per capita chocolate consumption in a country, there will likely be one more Nobel laureate in that country!

Hmm, that's something I can resolve to do for my country this new year....drive up its chocolate eating statistics (though I wonder ........would my chocolate eating boost India's Nobel Prize chances or Switzerland's?) . I do hope the Nobel committee is keeping its eye on this blog site ........

Tristan, here I come. Can heaven get better than this?
 

Santa in Switzerland

Well, truth be told there isn’t one. Well at least not the roly poly ho ho ho ing Santa from the north pole that slides down chimneys on Christmas eve. There is of course, Samichlaus who comes in from the forest on December the 6^th and rings the doorbell. He is really St. Nicholas, the Bishop of Myra and the patron saint of Children. His presents are always small : chocolates, nuts, oranges. He is sometimes accompanied by his friend; a soot covered figure called Schmutzli who it is said chastises kids who have been bad. Well, actually it is assumed that all children will have been a little good and a little bad and this is the time of the year they are rewarded for the good, take stock of their not so good and promise to try harder the next year.  Santa decorations are not seen often, and the ones I saw, the Santa was always lean, carries a backpack rather than a sac and is clambering in through a balcony or window rather than a chimney. 

Santa making somewhat precarious attempts to get in through the windows

Montreaux Christmas market

What is perhaps most striking is the relative absence of a commercial Christmas. Here it is not about  mega malls outdoing each other with the largest and brightest and fanciest glitz, not about retail frenzy, but about street markets selling local goods and lots of food.

It’s less about over the top celebrations and extravaganza and more about people retreating into family mode. It’s more about carols, mulled wine (always plenty of that), cookies, communities and Christmas traditions.

nativity scene at our local library

  

Muted, mellow ……………and as you sit in picture postcard Montreaux with the ethereal lake framed by snow capped mountains, the smell of cinnamon cookies wafting by, faint strains of church bells in the distance and as you chance upon a mother sitting with a glass of mulled wine huddled up to a toddler eating roasted chestnuts both listening to a grandfatherly man narrating a French Christmas story, the mellifluous French not needing to be understood to grasp its meaning……………….. you do not need to be Swiss, you do not need to be religious, you do not need to be Christian, you do not need to be a child ……….for those few moments, despite the incredibly troubled world we live in, you cannot but believe in magic, in humanity, in hope.  The hope that perhaps the Samichlaus in us can take precedence over the Schmutzli. 

Season's Greetings to all. 

Inducted into cooking

I discovered the day we moved into our new house some months ago, that I could not cook.

Actually, I could not even put on the stove. The gleaming black 4 plate surface looked like the one I had in my old apartment but no matter what I did, I could not get the plates to become hot. Handyman husband (self proclaimed) was called in, all he could come up with was 'you must be doing something wrong'. 

I began to harbour visions of a conspiracy between owner, previous tenants and the Regie (agent).......... but given that we had signed off on the house inspection and faced with the possibility of being reprimanded for our carelessness, not to mention the thought of several thousand Swiss francs evaporating before my eyes, I duly squashed such uncharitable thoughts.   

But two days into the house, six hours of google translate with the French and Italian instruction booklet, three cereal for breakfast, three cereal for lunch and three cereal for dinner meals later, it was time for action.  

I called the previous tenants. No doubt taken aback, the lady politely offers to take me through the steps. You press the button on your left, you wait for the red light, then you select a number from 1 to 9 ………

No, this does not work. She assure me it does. I assure her it does not; biting back the urge to ask if it ever did. Back and forth. Frustration rises on both sides. Finally she asks ‘Are you sure you have the right vessels?’ . Wondering whether to take offence, I answer “What do you mean?” I have a perfectly good frying pan. Its Swiss I might add. 25 years guarantee”. She persists: Yes, but is it the right kind?

And so I am initiated into the hitherto unknown to me wonders of induction cooking. Cooking which works through direct transmission of heat from the hob to the pot through magnetic waves. Its becoming increasingly the norm in newer houses and apartments in Switzerland. Its as precise as gas cooking, more energy efficient and safer. The only drawback is that it works only if the cookware is ferromagentic. 

Not all vessels are. Pan after pan, pot after pot, beautiful cookware inherited from my mother, my 25 year guarantee Swiss pan, my cheap  new to Switzerland collection from IKEA, my specially brought pressure cooker from India ………none worked. I had a modern kitchen and nothing to cook with!

But after the initial shock, it was excitement all the way. How often in life can one indulge in a guilt free, husband endorsed revamp of all the cookware one owns?? 

I love this type of cooking now and find it easier to use than the gas stoves I have grown up with. Whats more, I discovered a great fact: if you put a paper between the stove and the pan, the pan gets hot, not the paper!. So i often cook with a newspaper spread under my pots and save myself cleaning up my messy spills. Whats more, I never fail to start a most amazing dinner conversation by showing off this trick ...............

the water boils ..my 80 francs are unharmed!

Information tip : For those of you in Switzerland, the Swiss Government has a fact sheet and a list of rules, dos and donts (is there anything for which there are no rules in Switzerland?) for induction stoves at this link : Induction Hobs